Ben Taylor is the Co-founder and CEO of Cassette Group, an immersive technology company specializing in training, education, and communication solutions for enterprises.
The corporate utilizes 3D real-time technologies to deliver solutions through animation, immersive web technologies, VR, AR, and the metaverse.
Cassette’s solutions are business-focused, designed to integrate with client systems and improve outcomes while reducing costs in comparison with traditional methods.
Could you share the story behind the founding of Cassette Group? What inspired you to deal with immersive technology and AI for enterprise solutions?
Myself and the opposite Cassette directors, Ed and Mike, all come from a marketing agency and client service background, with careers within the agency network Omnicom amongst other experiences.
Working with large enterprise clients across many sectors we identified a chance to innovate digital communication beyond typical web sites and apps. We’re big believers that digital ‘experience’ is essential to not only engaging consumers with brand messaging, but additionally to enhance learning outcomes.
We all know that memory retention is significantly improved if the user engages with the content – you might be prone to remember 70% of something you ‘do’ vs only 20% of what you watch or take heed to. Undoubtedly the perfect experiences are in real life, but they should not accessible to everyone.
Cassette was founded to create higher digital experiences using these principles, improving training and communication content whilst increasing accessibility to broader demographics. Our vision is to democratise access to training and education.
Immersive, interactive technologies and Ai are the perfect tools to attain this goal. Mixing technologies enables us to create highly engaging content that make complex topics easy. No more is that this needed than within the ever-changing healthcare space.
Your AI-powered virtual patients provide realistic training for healthcare professionals. How do you ensure these interactions are as lifelike and effective as possible?
Our conversational Ai solutions are geared for very specific training needs. We’re using the technology to enable healthcare specialists to practice diagnosis of patients, deliver tough news, and even to de-escalate heated conversations. Our experiences allow users to talk with Ai characters through any web enabled device. The virtual Ai characters enable users to role play quite a lot of situations and practice their response.
In each instance detail and accuracy of the experience is amazingly necessary. And feedback from users suggests that realism of the conversation is a very powerful, not only the accuracy but speed of response from the Ai characters in addition to context. Visual fidelity is deemed less necessary and, in some cases, users need a clear distinction between an Ai character and an actual one.
As such, numerous work goes into the event of character knowledge, personality and conversational framework. Generative Ai is currently unreliable relating to consistency, hallucinating at probably the most unexpected times. This just isn’t accepted within the medical space so there are various guard rails and checks we put in place to maintain the experience on target. For an experience to be lifelike we want the characters to know their environment, situation and goal for the conversation. If a player were to ask a patient ‘what’s the capital of France’ in the midst of a medical diagnosis, we would like the Ai to know that’s an inappropriate query and to flag them up on it.
The effectiveness of the training comes right down to learning outcomes. Our experiences track the conversation in addition to the sentiment of the Ai character – pleased, sad, annoyed etc. We are able to due to this fact not only rating the user on achieving goals (asking the suitable questions, suggesting the proper next steps), but additionally provide feedback on how their delivery and where improvements may be made.
Armed with feedback the user can practice the conversation as again and again as they need.
How have Cassette Group’s immersive solutions impacted worker skills development in industries like healthcare? Are you able to share some success stories?
An incredible success story is the work we’ve got done with Baxter on their dialysis machine, the Prismax 2 – a tool for delivering Continuous Renal Alternative Therapy (CRRT) in critically unwell patients within the ICU.
Baxter commissioned us to develop a 3D digital twin of their device together with 10 training modules to coach doctors and nurses within the ICU. The training platform has been translated into ten languages and is on the market in hospitals across Europe.
Now, in institutions like Thameside hospital in Manchester, Northern England, Nurses equipped with VR headsets can learn learn how to use the machine in a web-based course, including videos and assessments of their knowledge.
Through our solution, staff on the hospital can now learn learn how to arrange the machine, input a prescription and patient details, and what to do in an emergency. Nurses and managers can track training progress through a web-based hub. The hospital says that the VR training has saved it money and time because nurses can learn more flexibly, in shorter periods of time, without having to take days off work for training.
How do you address concerns or resistance from employees or management who could also be skeptical in regards to the adoption of AI and immersive technology?
History tells us that with any latest technology or innovation there may be resistance to alter. There was an excellent story from Gartner on the adoption of email. An innovator was asked to supply a value evaluation and ROI on the usage of email across their business. Email was deemed as complimentary to traditional mail reasonably than replacing it. As such, the innovator was unable to make a solid case for the adoption of email against traditional mail. This seems absurd now but demonstrates how typical ROI evaluation can completely miss game changing opportunities, and stakeholders can dismiss an innovation since it just isn’t how things were done before.
Accepting that there might be resistance and skepticism is step one.
Addressing those concerns requires a tailored approach depending on the innovation and the stakeholder group you might be targeting. We have now found that with Ai, the adoption has been a top-down approach. Leaders are on board with it, they’ll see cost savings and productivity gains. Wider worker groups are more skeptical, concerned about Ai replacing them, or concluding that the brand new Ai tools aren’t all they’re cracked as much as be.
With Immersive technologies we’ve got seen adoption led from the underside up. Business units are seeing value in a brand new type of communication, while senior management needs convincing that it’s greater than only a video game gimmick.
In the primary example the approach was to implement education programmes that dispelled common Ai myths, provided base level training on the tools, and visualised the potential.
Within the second example the approach has been to show the technology solving real business challenges with a knowledge and analytical approach combined with anecdotal feedback from wider stakeholder groups.
In each case the approach is one among education. The messages must be clear and consistent, and tailored to your target market.
How do you approach designing user interfaces and experiences in AR/VR to make sure they’re intuitive and effective for users? What feedback mechanisms do you employ to constantly improve these experiences?
Designing immersive experiences starts with the identical query as any digital experience – who’s the top user?
Nonetheless, when designing for immersive technologies there are various other criteria that should be considered. These start before we even get to the user interface – Where will the user be engaging with the experience? What hardware are we using?
When designing educational VR training experiences within the healthcare space, accessibility to the experience is an enormous consideration.
You possibly can have probably the most amazing VR experience but unless the top user can easily pay money for a headset and log into the content, it is going to gather dust. It seems easy but often our content is geared toward doctors and nurses working in hospitals. Managing hardware (and software) in that environment is amazingly difficult, just ensuring a headset is charged and able to use may be tricky.
Any barrier to engagement with the training content should be ironed out. From access to hardware and likewise engagement with the content itself.
Understanding our audience are healthcare professionals and never VR gamers helps our team to design user friendly experiences that ensure users are learning in regards to the chosen content and NOT learn how to use VR. Controls are simplified as much as we are able to, users complete a comprehensive onboarding experience before the training content starts, and visual guides are clear and step-by-step.
Intuitive design comes from years of experience coupled with ongoing feedback, gathered through in-experience questionnaires and attending live sessions with the top user. Our secret comes from the ‘mum’ test, if I can hand an experience to my mum and she will be able to work it, we’ve passed (sorry mum!).
What emerging trends in AI and immersive technology do you suspect could have probably the most significant impact on training and development in the subsequent five years?
I feel we’ve got seen the foremost technologies which can be going to have an effect on this space over the subsequent few years. The largest impact might be the greater integration of those technologies into business.
For innovations to be adopted at enterprise level they must be robust. That usually signifies that while latest technologies can come along and disrupt the space, large enterprise businesses will take time to adopt and integrate them. Adoption just isn’t quick for reasons discussed previously, in addition to general aversion to risk within the digital space.
The immersive technology space is fragmented, with largely a ‘begin’ perception. Providers have been geared towards consumers, without the necessities in place to implement at an enterprise level, whether that be the safety protocols or general working practices.
The industry must, and is, maturing, producing solutions which can be fit for purpose on this space, which doesn’t at all times mean right on the bleeding edge. An incredible example of that is Microsoft’s metaverse platform, Mesh. Mesh allows for wealthy, immersive experiences from a laptop or in VR, fully integrated into the 365 suite, and shortly might be accessible through the Microsoft Teams app. This removes many barriers to adoption. Onboarding a brand new 365 feature is simpler for a big enterprise than a chunk of software from a brand new begin. Accessed through teams via the 365 log in, plus experiences viewable in desktop and in VR ensures content is definitely available to everyone within the organisation.
Simpler role out to the top user will reduce the general cost of content delivery, increasing potential use cases, and overall volume of production. We consider it will drive a mixing of technologies, resulting in training and learning experiences that mix visually immersive worlds with Ai driven content and characters. Consider the role play example on steroids.
Essentially the most exciting prospect here is the potential improvement in the standard of coaching and education. Often, education or profession paths are defined by the standard of education or training available. The higher the content we are able to create and the better it’s to access, the more people will profit.
With an ever-growing crisis in industries like nursing (who’re predicting a shortfall of 140k by 2030), something needs to alter, and these solutions may be a part of the reply, democratising access to training for all.
What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs or corporations seeking to integrate AI and immersive technologies into their operations?
Find the time to make it occur. Often innovation or deviation from the norm can take a back foot, deemed too time consuming or expensive to have a look at. Those who don’t innovate will inevitably lose out long run.
For enterprise, or any business for that matter, our advice is to at all times take a strategic approach to adoption and integration. Throwing mud on the wall just isn’t going to chop it.
Start by making a long-term vision, considering what the business could seem like if the technology was widely adopted. How does that affect the business? What improvements are the result?
Then consider the barriers to getting there, potential concerns, and the stakeholders we want to tackle the journey.
From there a plan may be drawn up to beat those barriers and concerns, identifying use cases for the technology to deal with them, rolling out slowly and effectively to get it right. One poor user experience can set things back a good distance.
Finally, jump headfirst into these technologies, they’re incredibly exciting with huge potential to make an enormous impact. And it’s fun!
